Monday, October 29th, 2012

Job: Systems Administrator and/or Hacker

Work anywhere!

Or work here!

You may never meet these fine people!

Brian Stinson, LibraryThing’s sysadmin is moving on–he’s landed a job working for Kansas State University, where he’s getting a Political Science degree. It’s a great move for him. We’re sad to see him go–and we need someone to step into his shoes!

The Job: Part-time Sysadmin or Full-time Wizard?

After all the good work by Brian and John before him, and with support from our our programmers, Mike Topper, Chris Holland and Chris Catalfo, LibraryThing’s systems administration is no longer a full-time job. Brian worked part-time.

So we’re looking to fill either:

  • Part-time sysadmin
  • Part-time sysadmin, part-time PHP programmer

As one of our programmers, Mike, has sysadmin experience, the proportion of sysadmin-ing may be as low as 25%. But you need to be able to handle more than that.

Systems Administrator

Qualifications: We’re looking for someone with broad systems administration experience, who can quickly pick up unfamiliar technologies, diagnose problems and keep everything running smoothly. You need to be calm under pressure, cautious and an excellent communicator. We’re a small team, so when things break at 4am, you need to be available.

Work Anywhere. LibraryThing is “headquartered” in Portland, Maine, but the servers are in Boston and many employees are in neither. We never even MET our last sysadmin—John in Tasmania.

Experience: Applicants need considerable experience running websites. Experience in Linux systems administration is essential; we use RHEL and CentOS, but you’ve probably got professional experience with at least half a dozen distros. Experience with MySQL is also important, including replication, monitoring and tuning. You will need to be able to demonstrate experience with remote server administration including lights-out management techniques and equipment.

Technologies. Here’s a partial list of the technologies we use.

  • Apache
  • Nginx
  • Memcache
  • Solr
  • Subversion
  • PHP
  • Python
  • Bash shell scripting
  • Munin
  • rrdtool
  • Xen and KVM virtualization
  • NFS
  • LVM
  • iscsi

PHP Programmer

LibraryThing runs on PHP, MySQL and JavaScript. We also have work for mobile app developers. Basically, we’d love to hear how you can help us.

You can find out more about our programming needs in this older post. If you’re applying as a programmer too, be sure to see and take the programming quiz below.

Compensation

Salary plus gold-plated health insurance.

How to Apply

Email: sysadminjob@librarything.com. Send an email with your resume. In your email, go through the sections of the blog post above, and indicate how you match up with the job. Be specific.(1) Please do not send a cover letter.

If you want to stand out, go ahead and take the LibraryThing Programming Test. We’ll definitely ask you to take it before we interview you.

Another job: We have another open job too, a new position as Customer support for LibraryThing for Libraries.


1. This job is going to be posted lots of places, and that means we’ll get a lot of people “rolling the dice.” If you don’t seem like you’re applying for this job, we’ll ignore your email.

Labels: employment, jobs

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